David Crosby
David Crosby is one of the great songwriters of our time. As a lynchpin of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, his music was as revolutionary as it was beautiful. With a new solo album out, we join Crosby to talk about vintage acoustics, what Joni Mitche
From the Byrds to CSN and solo work, Crosby is one of the great songwriters of our time. He joins us to talk about old guitars and new inspirations
Few people can talk with more authority about writing songs on guitar than David Crosby. From his gilded pen flowed the likes of Eight Miles High, Wooden Ships and Guinnevere. His voice, meanwhile, was one of the three pillars of pure harmony that made Crosby, Stills & Nash’s sound so bewitchingly powerful. But Crosby can bark, too: his fierce sense of social justice remains undimmed and his new album Sky
Trails addresses both affairs of the heart and the turbulent soul of America in the Trump era. By turns frank and thoughtful, we join David Crosby to talk about finding inspiration in new tunings and old guitars and why American protest-rock needs a new rallying cry. You’ve written some of the great songs of our time, from your work in the Byrds to Crosby, Stills & Nash and now a fine new solo album, Sky Trails. Do you write quickly and instinctively or do you tinker with songs at length before you call them finished? “Both… I would say both. I do like to tinker – I call it craftsmanship – but yes, I do like to hone and polish. Very often, what you get is what you get, and there it is. You don’t want to fuck with it too much, you want to catch that magic that you caught. It’s hard to know which way to go.” Do you write mainly on guitar? “Yes. Usually in a strange tuning of some sort, but yes, that’s how I write. I have written sometimes on piano, and I’m trying to get better on piano, but I don’t really play piano well.” What particular guitars, if any, do you gravitate to for songwriting? “I have some stunning guitars, I have some D-60 and D-45s that are pretty stellar, that are what I usually work with. I also have some McAlister guitars that I think are as good as that, if not better, which is saying a lot.” Tell us about the McAlisters... “He’s a wonderful cat. He came to me with a guitar and said, ‘Here, I’ve made this for you,’ and I said, ‘Who are you?’. He said, ‘I’m the guy who made the 12-string Santa Cruz that you had built there, I’m the one who made it. I made you this six-string, I’d like you to try it.’ So I tried it, and it was the best guitar I ever played, right away. So I said, ‘Okay, let me buy it from you.’ He said, ‘No, I’m giving it to you.’ I did an article with a guitar mag about it shortly afterwards and it got him like three years worth of work in six weeks. He’s an amazing maker.” Do you tend to work with a lot of guitars when recording? “Yes, I do, and here’s the reason, because I work in so many different tunings. When you change tunings, the guitar doesn’t stay: it wants to go back to the tuning it was last in, so it’s very difficult for it. Because a guitar tends to go back to the last tuning it was in when you try to change the tuning, you need to keep them in a tuning, and then switch guitars, rather than switch tunings. So it takes, for me to do a performance, I need, like, five or six guitars and a guitar tech – because I use almost everything that’s in a track.” Do you have any guitars that have been with you through all of your career? “Yes, the first D-18 that I bought, I bought with my own money in Chicago, in some suburb, and rode back downtown in the bus with it. So yes, that D-18 I still have, I converted it because I went through a period where I just loved 12-strings, and I was very taken with them. I had learned a lot about 12-strings from Bob Gibson, Fred Neil, and some other people that played them. So I had it converted to a 12-string in what’s-his-name’s shop in Berkley.
“It was a spectacular guitar, and I still have that one. I still have the Gretsch that I played in the Byrds; I still have my Fender Strat that I’ve had since we started Crosby, Stills & Nash; I still have the guitars I’ve played at Woodstock. So, yes, I pretty much have all the stuff that I’ve collected over the years. They’re not, you know…. other people buy guitars that belong to a person. Like, ‘This is Duane Allman’s guitar,’ or something. But I bought guitars that play beautifully and sound stellar, so that’s the kind I have. I love them. But I am trying to give them away or sell some of them, because I don’t think they should be on a wall. I think they should be being played.”
There’s certainly some beautiful acoustic passages on the new album. The fingerstyle and duet harmony of the title track was particularly powerful. “Oh, that’s Becca Stevens. If you listen to the record before this one, Lighthouse, she and I sang together on that one too, on a song called By The Light Of Common Day, which we also wrote together, and we wrote this one together. She’s a young lady that I think is one of the most promising singer/ songwriters I’ve been able to ‘collect’. I’m always out looking for them, I mean, I found Joni Mitchell and I found Jackson Brown, so I’m doing okay.
“So yes, the guitar part is Becca, and she’s a very odd guitar player. It’s in a nonstandard tuning. She and I both do that a great deal. She’s a fascinating musician, man, look her record up. Look up the last couple of her records, she’s somebody you want to know, trust me.” Lush vocal harmonies have been hand-inglove with your songwriting and so many guitarists would love to nail them if they could. Any pointers? “God, I wish I had some, sort of, magic little trick, but there isn’t one. It’s one of those darned 10,000-hour things. There’s really no school for it, there’s really no short cut. There are established paths towards being a good harmony singer. You start out with the Everly Brothers, that’s grade school, that’s where you start. “You you listen to them a lot, and they’ll teach you a whole shitload about singing harmony. Then you start getting into sophisticated harmony singing, and there’s a ton of people who do it extremely well. The Beatles, there’s a perfect example, they did brilliant harmony work, over and over and over again, all through everything. I mean, right from the get-go, you don’t even have to wait until Rubber Soul or
Revolver. Right from the start they’re singing great harmony.
“Other people, well, the Beach Boys, in an entirely different style. It was unique: only Brian Wilson ever thought that shit up. Who else? I personally think Amy and Emily, the Indigo Girls, have done some of the most really inventive and really good harmony singing of anybody. Then, of course, there’s James Taylor, who, with other people and with himself, does some of the best harmony work you’ve ever heard in your life.
“Who else do I admire? Well I’ve heard some amazing harmony work recently from one act in particular: there are three girls who work separately by themselves, Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. They go under the name I’m With Her. Stunning, stunning harmony work. There are three girls from England called The Staves, stunning harmony work, really nice, really innocent, you know, sweet, delicious harmony work. There are, oh my God, there are so many, man.
“Listen to the chorus stuff in Steely Dan, for example. Michael McDonald, man, is one of the two greatest singers alive, the other one is Stevie Wonder. Neither one of them is Kanye West – that guy really can’t sing his way out of a box. He made me so mad saying he was the greatest living rock singer, I got on Twitter and said, ‘Hey, would somebody please drive him over to Stevie Wonder’s house right away?’” How did you keep your harmony singing so tight playing stages like Woodstock, where monitoring was crude to say the least? “Well, when we started as the Byrds, we
“Kanye West really can’t sing his way out of a box. I tweeted ‘Would somebody please drive him over to Stevie Wonder’s house right away?’”
didn’t have monitors – but as we got more sophisticated with the thing, we got our own monitors, and we got a really good monitor mixer. That’s where you can really make a huge difference. It has a great deal to do with getting a really talented [engineer] doing the monitors for you, and then you have to work at it. That doesn’t come for free. I’ve been lucky, I’ve worked with people who are excellent at harmony singing. Nash is probably one of the best harmony singers in the world.” Let’s move on to another singersongwriter icon, Joni Mitchell. On your new album cover her beautiful song Amelia. Why did you pick that track to pay tribute to her work? “Well, I’ve always loved the song. The way she writes about her heart and her own love life at the same time, writing on two levels at the same time so deftly, so beautiful, it just kills me. It’s an unbelievably good set of words, unbelievably beautiful song. I’ve always wanted to sing it and I’ve always been a little afraid to tackle it, because it was, I think, one of the best songs I ever heard.
“Finally, I just couldn’t stand it anymore, I did sing it, I sang it very simply, because I treasure the words. She sings it much more ornately than I do, but I am happy with how I sang it, and I’m really happy with how James played it. Sometimes you have to take a chance, and that’s me taking a chance, I don’t know if I’m good enough to sing that song, but I couldn’t resist doing it, so I did.” As someone who has known her well over the years, what have you taken from watching Joni create songs? “Well, we went together for about a year, and it was a fascinating experience. I would come up with my very best, you know, I’d say, ‘Hey I wrote this song. Listen to this, honey.’ And I’d sing her Guinnevere, and she’d sing me three back that good. It was a very deflating experience, keeps you from really thinking you’re cool and groovy – puts you in your place. Go ahead, be a songwriter living in the same house as Joni Mitchell, try it! It was quite an experience, believe me – but good for me. Joni and Michael Hedges are the two people who have re-tuned the guitar the most and then done the most incredible things with it. I love Michael Hedges and I love Joni for doing that, they opened up a whole world for me in tunings. I will always be grateful to her for that.” Tell us a ‘secret weapon’ tuning of yours… “Yes, I’ll give you one. E-B-D-G-A-D. That’s the one that I did Guinnevere and
Déjà Vu in.” You take Trump-era politics to task very powerfully on the album, on the track Capitol. With, arguably, no new Joan Baez or even Dylan in view, do you think the era of music as a voice of protest has passed? “I definitely do not think it is dead. I think that there are people making songs about our times right now, really well. The one that I want isn’t here yet, though. I’ve been asking people on Twitter and on Facebook, saying, ‘Hey, you know what we need? We need an Ohio. We need a song that strong to rally ourselves around, because this guy is destroying our country.’ We’ve got to fight back. We need a We Shall
Overcome or an Ohio, or something, you know, a rallying cry. I said, ‘I’m trying to write it, but I haven’t come up with it yet. So, please, all you songwriters out there, give it a shot.’
“We’ll see. I do know there’s one, that you probably haven’t heard, there’s one really great song about Trump called The Man In
The Tin Foil Hat. That’s Donald Fagen and Todd Rundgren. Look it up, it’ll make you laugh so hard, you’ll split a gut. You’ll wet your drawers.” Looking back on a back catalogue that takes in everything from the Byrds and CSN to brilliant solo work such as Sky Trails, do you prefer writing in a group setting or by yourself? “Both. I love writing with other people, because the other person always thinks of something you didn’t, and I’ve had real success at it. Michael League is a wonderful cat to write with, a wonderful writer, and a joy to write with. We wrote three of the best songs on [the album] Lighthouse in the first three days we were together, just bang, bang, bang, just like that.
“My son James, one of the best writers I’ve ever encountered in my life, and he knows what I love, and he knows how to make me happy musically. He’s just an incredible writer, he wrote that first song on this record himself. I didn’t write it, he wrote it, it’s terrific. The thing about writing with other people, you know, you spark them, they spark you.
“In general, it’s as if you had a palette of colours that you were painting with, right, and there were seven colours on the palette. You start writing with somebody else, suddenly you’ve got 14 colours. Can’t be a bad thing, almost always works out well. I like that, I’m not greedy for power or greedy for the money, I want the best art. If doing that makes for good art then I’m really happy doing that.”
“I’ve always wanted to sing Amelia.I’ve always been a little afraid to tackle it, because it was, I think, one of the best songs I ever heard”